Constructed in 1680 and situated on some of the most breathtaking acreage in Tuscany, Villa Cetinale may be the world's most delightful haunted house. According to legend, the builder of the property, Cardinal Flavio Chigi—a nephew of Pope Alexander VII's—murdered a rival, as princes of the church were inclined to do in those days. Some believe the ghost of the vanquished cleric has rattled around Cetinale ever since. Nevertheless, the magnificent 12-bedroom Baroque villa, designed by Bernini's great pupil Carlo Fontana, has endured as "one of the celebrated pleasure-houses of its day," as Edith Wharton noted in her 1904 study, Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

In May, Cetinale's latest chapter began, after Edward Richard Lambton, the seventh Earl of Durham, known as Ned, moved in following a five-year renovation. Still, there seems to be a remaining specter or two to deal with, beginning with Ned's father, Antony, who died on December 30, 2006, at the age of 84.

As anyone over a certain age in Britain remembers, the late Lord Lambton resigned abruptly in 1973 from Prime Minister Edward Heath's Cabinet, where he had been a junior defense minister, after being photographed in bed with two prostitutes and a joint in his mouth. The tryst, in a Maida Vale flat, had been captured on a hidden camera rigged by the News of the World. In the annals of great English political sex scandals, the episode ranks just under the Profumo affair.

Tony, as the longtime Tory M.P was called by friends, gave up his political career and went into a grand exile in Italy. In a Lord Marchmain moment, he left his wife and their six children in Lambton Park, their enormous estate in County Durham, in the Northeast of England, and acquired the fabulous but then disheveled Villa Cetinale, near Siena, which was still owned by the Chigi family. For nearly three decades, Lambton held court here, with his mistress, Claire Ward. Highly charming at one moment and lacerating the next, he reigned as the "King of Chiantishire," as he was dubbed, and entertained the likes of Prince Charles and Tony Blair. "When you were invited to Cetinale, you felt like you had really arrived," recollects an English grandee.

Upon his father's death, Ned inherited the earldom and became the beneficiary of his father's entire estate, which included 7,000 acres in England. In accordance with the English practice of primogeniture, his five elder siblings—females all—were bypassed.

Six years later, Ned has just completed an arduous renovation that has restored the villa to its glory. Nonetheless, a bit of drama continues to hover over Cetinale. Some of it is of a happy nature. Fifty-one-year-old, twice-divorced Ned—who has a 27-year-old son by his first wife and an 11-year-old daughter with a former girlfriend—surprised his social circle in March 2010 when he announced his engagement to a longtime family friend, the very lovely Marina Hanbury, who is 20 years his junior. The couple married 10 months later and then welcomed a daughter, Lady Stella, last October.

On the less joyful side, Ned recently stopped speaking to at least a few of his five sisters—Lady Lucinda, Lady Beatrix, Lady Anne, Lady Isabella, and Lady Rose— after the first three threatened legal action against him in a twist that sounds like a Downton Abbey plotline. Because Tony lived so long in Italy, they contend they are entitled to shares of his estate under the Napoleonic Code, the revised version of ancient Roman law, upon which Italian law is still based. Furthermore, Ned's niece Rose Bowdrey, 39 (Beatrix's daughter), who had been managing Cetinale for him, made what has been described as a stormy departure around the time she moved in with 52-year-old Domitilla Getty, wife of Mark Getty (co-founder of Getty Images). The Gettys, who have three children and who occupied a nearby hamlet, Orgia, which they had restored, later separated after nearly 30 years of marriage.

Needless to say, there has been plenty of chatter in Tuscany, and beyond, regarding recent events Up at the Villa.

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'It's the vibe-iest house in the world," Lord Johnson Somerset tells me over drinks by the pool. Somerset, the bon-vivant youngest son of the Duke of Beaufort and a music producer for Bryan Ferry, is part of a merry weekend house party of close friends who have come from England to help Ned inaugurate the newly renovated villa this past May. Like most members of this group, Somerset was also a guest here in the old days,

Marina, who is cradling in her arms the angelic-looking Stella, came here first as a baby herself, brought by her parents, Emma and Timmy Hanbury, scion of an old brewery family, who are here for the weekend, too. Even before they met each other, both Timmy and Emma came to Cetinale, as they were Lambton-family friends. Emma was a frequent visitor in the late 70s when she was the girlfriend of Jasper Guinness, who lived nearby. Cetinale itself has just been redecorated by Camilla Guinness, who was Jasper's wife from 1985 until his death, last year.

There has been plenty of chatter in Tuscany and beyond, regarding recent events UP AT THE VILLA.

Over lunch in the garden, near a magnificent avenue of towering cypress trees on the 165-acre property, Emma talks about Cetinale then and now: "When I first came here, I was blown away by its beauty. But Tony and Claire lived here in a very unflash way. It was incredibly nice and relaxed, but, let's just say... by the pool you had a couple of rickety chairs and towels thrown around. Ned has preserved the history of the house, but now it's like a five-star hotel."

The Cetinale veterans at the table all agree, too, how vastly the food has improved, thanks to the first-rate chef Ned just hired, who blends classic Italian cuisine with Asian influences. Though reminiscing about the English nursery-school fare served in the old days seems to amuse everybody—when Prince Charles came to lunch, he was served fish pie, reportedly frozen, from Marks & Spencer.

"It was disgusting," Ned recalls of Cetinale's former cuisine. "Mrs. Ward, instead of hiring a chef, had these Australian girls on their gap years do the cooking," he explains. "I wasn't here when Prince Charles visited, but he went to Gordonstoun, where the food is horrid, so it must have reminded him of his childhood. He may have liked it."

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A lean, lanky fellow with handsome features, Ned Lambton has a wonderfully dry English sense of humor. And he is refreshingly honest about the class he comes from. "I can't claim that I worked," he tells me that evening over drinks in a vaulted-ceilinged salon.

"We've always lived in County Durham," he says. "Some people look down on me because the Earldom of Durham was only created in 1833." The first earl, he recounts, was John George Lambton, a radical Whig statesman who served as ambassador to Russia and governor-general of Canada.

"I loathed Eton," he continues. "My father hated Harrow, so he sent me to Eton. His father had hated Eton, so he sent him to Harrow. How much nicer it would be to stay home, under the loving roof of your mother and father ..." This last sentence he delivers with faux wistfulness.

For nearly three decades, Tony Lambton reiqned as the "KING OF CHIANTISHIRE," as he was dubbed and entertained the likes of Prince Charles and Tony Blair.

Which brings the conversation to his father's scandal, which exploded when Ned was 11. "It was on the front pages of the newspapers. They kept them away from me, so I didn't know what was going on. But one day the school matron took me in her room. I remember her explaining it to me. She didn't explain it very well.

"She said, 'Your father went to see a woman.' She didn't explain what kind of woman or what he did with her. I was mystified. I later found out what 'went to see' means. When it was explained it was about sex, I understood it better, but this vital fact was kept from me."

As the scandal raged and school holidays arrived, Ned's parents took him and his sisters to a private island in the Bahamas. "We hid out there until it had died down," Ned recalls. "Then everybody forgot about it—except for the fucking Daily Mail. They mention it again and again, to this day. Can't bear the Daily Mail."

In the 33 years between when the scandal broke and Lord Lambton's death, not once did he discuss the matter with his son. "He never mentioned it. He knew we knew about it. That was enough. I don't know what we would have discussed. As far as my father was concerned, he got caught, he resigned, and that was the end of the story."

In an interview he once gave to a British journalist, Lambton was unrepentant. Pressed to explain his actions, he replied, "People sometimes like variety. I think it's as simple as that."

(Norma Levy, one of the prostitutes he had patronized, was then reputed to be London's most sought-after dominatrix, with a client list said to include Stavros Niarchos, the Shah of Iran, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and John Paul Getty. In 2007, Levy gave an interview—to the Daily Mail, natch—in which she recalled some of those clients' proclivities. According to Levy, Getty would have her lie down in an open coffin and he would then just stare at her for an hour.) Today, Ned looks at the scandal philosophically. "If it hadn't happened, he wouldn't have resigned and moved to Italy and we wouldn't be sitting here now. So thank you, Norma Levy, prostitute."

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In the ensuing decades, Lord Lambton would occasionally come home to County Durham and rejoin his family for Christmases, or to take part in shoots on his estates. He remained married to Ned's mother, Belinda, who was called Bindy, until her death, in 2003. "She was what is politely known as an eccentric," explains Ned. "My mother lived in a sort of make-believe world where everything was ideal. We knew it wasn't, but since she thought it was we didn't suggest otherwise, because we knew it was futile. Her fantasies were frustrating if you didn't go along."

But Bindy was not so blithe as to allow her teenage son to go off to Italy to stay with her husband and his mistress. "Because he was living with Mrs. Ward, she wouldn't allow me to come here. I didn't come until I was about 16, and even then I had to make things up, like saying I was going to France. But then I started coming here regularly and fell in love with it."

Needless to say, Lambton was not particularly hands-on as a parent. An early, rare effort to mold Ned was not a success. "After I left Eton, my father told me he had a friend in Argentina. So I was sent to Argentina to become a man. Didn't work."

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Back in England, a brief career playing the electric guitar in an acid-rock band he formed called the Frozen Turkeys followed. "We played the Marquee club once, which for a band is supposed to be a step on the ladder to making it, which we certainly didn't. It was great fun, but I'm glad it's over," he says. (Currently he plays acoustic guitar in a country-music band, Pearl, TN, which has just released a debut album, Leave Me Alone.)

In 1997 he stood for Parliament, in Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum Party. The run, in his father's old constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed, was quixotic. "I knew I wasn't going to get elected, but that was part of the attraction of doing it," he says. "I wouldn't have wanted to be an M.P, but it was fascinating to go knocking on people's doors up there."

In 2000 he moved to a remote beach in the Philippines, where he lived for about six years in a grass-roofed house he had built. "People ask me, 'Why the Philippines?' If I showed you one picture of the spot I lived, you would understand. I was able to indulge all my Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan fantasies."

But it wasn't all playtime. Through a dish antenna he installed at the domicile, he communicated constantly with the manager of the family estates. By then, Tony had ceded most responsibilities to his son. Notwithstanding Ned's self-effacing statements, running big properties such as these is serious work.

The seventh Earl of Durham's agreeable manner extends to his former wives and girlfriends. "We are all still very good friends," he says. In 1995 he ended his 12-year marriage to Christabel McEwen, granddaughter of a Scottish baronet who is the mother of his heir, Frederick, Viscount Lambton, and married Catherine FitzGerald, daughter of the 29th Knight of Glin, a union that lasted seven years. Through a short relationship with Jennie Guy, an Irish artist, he has a daughter, Molly, 11, who lives with her mother in Dublin.

Attempting to break the family cycle of public-school misery, Ned sent Fred to the liberal Bedales School. But then a friend persuaded Fred to transfer to the more traditional Stowe. "He absolutely hated it," says Ned. "One day he rang me up and said, 'I've run away from school. I'm at the Savoy hotel.' I thought it showed a bit of style that he checked in there."

Lambton says he is proud of his son's post-collegiate work as an environmental activist, but had concerns about an occupational hazard. "He kept getting arrested," Ned recounts (protesting airport expansions, etc.).

In late 2009, Ned's life was transformed. It started with a dream, near, of all places, Seattle, where he was preparing to embark on a voyage across the Pacific on the Lone Wolf, his Nordhavn long-range motorboat. "I had this dream that Marina and I were married. We were in love and blissfully happy." Then he woke up in his rented house. "I've known Marina forever. But I never thought I would end up with her. There is a 20-year age gap," he explains. Hanbury, who had worked as a model and also was a parliamentary assistant, came to Cetinale nearly every summer of her adolescence on holidays with her parents.

But that morning, Ned contacted Marina via Facebook and confessed his dream to her. "I know I am way too old for you but I love you," he explained to her.

A day later, he was amazed by the reply. "I told him I'd loved him since I was 18," Marina recounts to me. "I'd always had a crush on him, but I felt it was unrealistic. I never thought anything would happen. But we met up for dinner in London, and three weeks later we were engaged." The pair married in a London register office in January 2011. "We both felt so sure," says Ned. "And it has turned out great. We are very happy and compatible. And as Marina has pointed out to me, I can't afford another divorce," he says with a laugh. Ned and Marina kept their romance quiet in its first months, however, which made the announcement of their engagement a happy surprise for most friends and family. But the gossip mill was soon distracted by the new friendship between Ned's niece Rose, who is known as Ro-Ro, and Domitilla Getty. "When Ned and Marina got together we were like, wow," says a family friend. "But then Domitilla and Ro-Ro got together, and it was wow Domitilla and RoRo trumped Ned and Marina." (Around the same time, there had been another momentous match in the Hanbury family, when Marina's younger sister, Rose, married David Rocksavage, the seventh Marquess of Cholmondeley, who is the Queen's Ford Great Chamberlain and lives at Houghton Hall, one of England's greatest stately homes.)

Restoring Cetinale was a daunting task. While Ned's father and Mrs. Ward had done a spectacular job restoring the garden, which is considered one of the most beautiful in Italy, they had done little more than spruce up the ancient building itself. So it fell to Ned to replace the roof, as well as the plumbing, wiring, heating, and so forth.

For interior decoration, he turned to London-based Camilla Guinness. "My main aim was to alter the villa as little as possible. Barring [extensive] damage by dog pee to all the curtains and gilded table legs, and a shortage of bathrooms, it was pretty perfect the way it was," Guinness says. "The real challenge was to make sure things weren't over-restored and to try to keep the patina of walls and furniture."

"What Camilla has done is amazing," says Marina, the Countess of Durham, "but the house has still got all its charm and magic."

It remains to be seen, however, if the potential legal challenge introduced by the Lambton sisterhood will alter Cetinale's future. Ned does not appear to be particularly worried. "My father was an Englishman, and it's an English will," he says. The lawyers who wrote the document for his parent knew what they were doing, he reveals. Estate planners—and screenwriters—take note: "Cetinale is not legally owned by me, but by the trustees of a company set up by my father, Cetinale, Ltd., based in New Zealand," he explains. "I am a beneficiary of this trust and run the company on its behalf.

"Why they are threatening to sue now, when I got on with them for 50 years, I don't know," says Ned. "But whatever the court decides—if it comes to that..." he says, his voice trailing off. "My lawyer told me it might take 20 years, so I will let you know in 20 years. But if [my sisters] want to pay lawyers it's not for me to stop them."

Four months later, however, a thaw in the frost seemed to be setting in. On September 15, Ned e-mailed to report that lines of communication with his siblings were open, "so perhaps the whole sorry mess can be sorted out." A day earlier, an attorney representing the sisters called to tell me his clients were hoping to resolve the situation "by diplomatic means." He added, however, that the ladies "are quite resolute" in the goal.

According to a longtime family friend, what blame there is lies with the siblings' late father: "It's Tony's fault. He failed to make provisions for them." ("Them" is meant to apply as well to Claire Ward, who was also left out of Lord Lambton's will and departed Cetinale immediately after he died. She lives in Hampshire today.)

But, of course, the situation is owed to England's custom of primogeniture.

For wisdom on this practice, I recall a conversation I had a few years ago with someone who knows its consequences as well as anyone—Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. In 2007, following the death of her husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, she had to vacate her 297-room home, Chatsworth, after 50-some years. "It's deeply unfair and very wise," she sums up about primogeniture. "We were all brought up with the idea of it, so no good grumbling about it. That's just how it 'tis."

Her experiences on the Continent, seeing the fruits of the Napoleonic Code, never persuaded her to alter her opinion. "The  old ladies and everyone all live in a heap together.... I cannot imagine anything more conducive to family rows," she says. And those big houses are practically empty, too, "as every child has had a go at the furniture and the pictures."

But, on the basis of a weekend at Cetinale, it would appear that there is little more conducive to happiness than possession of a fabulous Tuscan villa. At the end of a long, excellent dinner, the table having gone through countless bottles of Brunello, Somerset has everyone in stitches as he recounts tales of his gaffes when the Queen weekended at Badminton House, his family's fabled estate in Gloucestershire. Then ghost stories are traded, and the conversation turns to Cetinale's resident spirit.

"I did feel something sneaking around my bed once," Marina recalls.

"It must have been my father," says Ned, roaring with laughter.